Messy Family Books to Read With Your Book Club

Here, award-winning Khong starts her tale off in New York City right before the new millennium. Lily Chen, the 22-year-old daughter of Chinese immigrants who’s working as an unpaid intern, meets the privileged Matthew, and the two eventually have a kid. Years later, in 2021, Nick Chen is 15 and goes off searching for his biological father — which is not as straightforward a quest as he first thinks.

Gifty is on her way to getting her PhD at Stanford in neuroscience when her mother starts to experience severe depression again. She had experienced it before when Gifty’s brother, a 16-year-old gifted high school athlete, died of an opioid addiction that started with a prescription for an injury. Gifty hopes to find salvation for her family in the lab mice’s brains she examines as she finds herself turning back to her evangelical upbringing to cope with loneliness in this novel that grapples with depression, grief, addiction, and the juxtaposition of science and faith.

I’m not going to lie, this is a tome at around 800 pages. It’s definitely more than my struggling attention span can handle, but I know it’s worth pushing through. Jeffers tells a truer story of America, one that takes into account the mixing of cultures and its duality. This duality presents itself in many ways, one of which was first described at length by the book’s namesake. The duality Du Bois spoke of, or the “Double Consciousness,” has been inherent to many Black Americans and isn’t lost on the book’s main character, Ailey Pearl. Ailey is named after the famed Black choreographer Alvin Ailey and her ancestor Pearl, who was a descendant of enslaved people. Ailey’s need to better understand her roots drives the story as she uncovers the truth of her ancestors— who they were, what they did, and what that means for her now— in this sweeping, elegant new American standard.

From the author of Cutting for Stone comes a books that made the bestseller list for a good while, and was one of Oprah’s book club picks (she even called it “one of the best books I’ve read in my entire life.”).

This story of a girl who would come to be known as Big Ammachi—which essentially translates to “Big Momma”— twists and turns, intertwining as the waterways do that she and her to-be family live by in Southern India. Big Ammachi’s family, part of a Christian community with a long history, will be as gifted as they are cursed, with the curious incidence of drowning being a common theme reoccurring through the generations. Starting in 1900, we experience the change and advancements time brings as Big Ammachi experiences them.

The author of the award-winning Miracle Creek is back with a mystery that asks some interesting questions. When the father and son of a biracial Korean and white family don’t come home on time from a walk, the rest of the family doesn’t immediately call the police. But when Mia’s 20-year-old brother, Eugene, comes through the door bloody and without their father, they know that something’s wrong. Eugene is a witness to what happened but is unable to speak. As time passes and the window for finding their father alive shrinks, we learn of the intricacies of the Parksons’ lives, including the secrets that may be connected to the father’s disappearance.

This rethinks a story that has become an American standard and tells it in 1863 when the Civil War is in full swing. The March family has established itself in the developing Freedmen’s Colony of Roanoke Island where recently emancipated people have set roots. We follow the four March daughters—Meg the teacher, Jo the writer, Beth the seamstress, and Amy the dancer—as they come into their own. I feel like I don’t come across enough stories of Black people during this time that don’t have us in chains, so seeing a different side of Black family life during this time is refreshing.